Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 192 : Habit Tune-Up Returns!

Episode Date: April 21, 2022

Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). For instructions on submitting your own questions, go to calnewport.com/podcast.Video from today’s episode:  youtube.com/calnewportmediaDEEP DIVE: The Crypto Question No One is Asking [1:43]QUESTIONS:- Should I be productive or bill more hours? [24:51]- Can someone with ADHD succeed with Deep Work? [28:44]- Can I find depth if I have roommates? [33:12]- How do I track more publications? [37:49]- I can’t time-block. What should I do? [43:33]- How do I tame Netflix? [47:19]- How does Cal come up with ideas? [55:04]- How do I shorten weekly planning sessions? [58:26]    Thanks to our Sponsors:Headspace.com/QuestionsLadderLife.com/DeepAthleticGreens.com/DeepBlinkist.com/DeepThanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, and Mark Miles for mastering. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions. Episode 192. I'm here in my Deep Work H.Q. As with Monday's episode, I am solo. Jesse is on his trip. He will be back for next week's episode. Good news for everyone. Our one episode experiment with the Jesse Scarecrow has come to a merciful end.

I have dismantled, burned, soaked in holy water, the Jesse Scarecrow. And I think we can say without exaggeration that that was a dark time, not just in the show's history, but in our nation's history. So we've moved past it. No Jesse Scarecrow. Have a good episode. I always, I say always, but I wanted to try some different things when Jesse wasn't here. maybe some things he would have rightly talked to me out of. So for one, I'm doing more questions than normal.

I wanted to get back into the spirit of the original habit tune-up episodes we used to do on Thursday, which would be more nuts and bolts focused. And so it went a little overboard. I think I have seven or eight questions here. They're not calls. I can't really handle the calls well on my own. So they're just written questions. We would normally do calls on Thursday, but they're written questions.

But I have more than normal. And I want to be a little bit more rapid fire. just get through a bunch of questions. Let's just get our hands dirty with some nuts and bolts, productivity, deep life habit, tune-up. So we'll give that a try. I also have a deep dive I want to start with, and I may be a little bit nervous about it, because the deep dive about crypto, I know just enough about crypto to make it clear I don't know about crypto, and it annoys to crypto heads.

So I'm probably going to embarrass myself with the deep dive today as well as anger a lot people, but, you know, Jesse's not here to talk me out of it, so why not? So with that in mind, let us do a deep dive, which I am calling with trepidation, the crypto question no one is asking. So let me again, set the foundation here. My goal in this deep dive is to build up to a question about crypto technology that is almost certainly very naive. and will be laughed at by those who are serious about this tech, and I will be dismissed as a dweeb. However, I'm just curious why I don't hear this talked about.

So I'm going to ask it anyways, and those in the audience can educate me, but let's put it out there. All right, so I'm going to build up to my question about crypto that no one is asking. Let's do a little bit of a basic tech overview for those in the audience who have the good fortune of knowing nothing about crypto. There's many different ways to come at it. Here's the way I like to think about this technology. Imagine I am offering you the following tool. A ledger book or logbook where you can submit an entry

and that entry will be written into the ledger or logbook. And it's numbered. Here's entry number one. Here's entry number two. Here's entry number three. You don't know exactly where it's going to go into it, but it'll get written in there. We'll get around to it.

We'll write it into the log book. Two, assume that you sign your entry. So, you know, people know it's not forged. Once it goes into a logbook, we know this really came from Cal. And three, it is publicly inspectable. So anyone can walk up to that logbook at any time or that ledger and look through all of the entries. And I guess I'll say a fourth thing. You can't change it.

We write an ink. So it would be clear. If someone tried to cross something out or something, we would say that's shenanigans. You can't change it once it's in there. That turns out to be a really useful thing. Because now if we have a distributed ledger to use the crypto terminology that everyone can inspect and you can't forge the entries and you can't change the entries, we could use that distributed ledger as the foundation for lots of different stuff we might want to do.

We could, for example, keep track of money. If I wanted to give you $5, I could write something to ledger. that says, I am giving this person's $5. And then later, if they wanted to give someone else $2, they would say, I'm giving this person $2. And we could just check through the ledger, looking from the beginning forward, who gave money to who, and say,

do you actually have that money to give. Now you do, so we all now keep track of you of having less money. So that would be useful. You could run a currency. You could have contracts on there. You can make agreements on there that everyone could then see. And so everyone agreed. You know, we write in a contract that says,

I am going to give a boat the cow by noon on Sunday and if I don't he gets to keep my house or something and him and I sign it that person signs it everyone can see it so everyone agrees if I don't get a boat like hey you guys agreed to this we all see it

you know he owns your house so there's like a lot of useful stuff it turns out it's kind of boring but it turns out distributed ledger is useful so what we have with the stand standard crypto technologies is a distributed way of implementing one of these ledgers. So lots of different people work together to actually establish and implement one of these ledgers. And the way they actually do it in most crypto setups is, I mean, it's not super interesting, but essentially people have a proposal for what they want the next entry into ledger to be.

And they're going to tell people, hey, this is what I think, you know, entry seven should be. And they're going to broadcast it over the internet and try to get other people to agree to it. And the problem, if we just did that, is that people would be constantly broadcasting. This is what I think it should be. This is what I should think it would be. We would never reach any sort of consensus there. So what most cryptocurrency or crypto technologies do is say before you can propose what the next entry should be in the ledger, you have to solve a puzzle. So there's a puzzle.

It's semi-cryptographic. that's kind of hard to solve, but easily verified. So if you solve it, everyone can verify you have the answer real easy. This is very hard to solve it. So you have to solve a hard puzzle and attach the answer to your proposal that this is what the next entry into ledger should be. So that's how these ledgers work. And these puzzles are hard enough that it's unlikely that a bunch of people will solve it

at the same time. So if you're the first one to solve it, you have open water. You're proposing this is what I think entry seven should be. there's no one else with a solve puzzle so that eventually people accept that's what it is and people move on to the next entry. And by the time someone else solves the puzzle for entry 7,

we may already be three or four entries further down the chain. And the rule is, hey, if you already have enough entries down the chain, you're not going to go back and change it. And there's some details there, but that's it. And what are the puzzles? The puzzles aren't that interesting. It's just one way hash functions. So it's functions

that you give a entry to, an input to, and a spit out a random seeming output. And the puzzles are literally just trying to find an input that's going to get an output that has enough zeros in a row. There's really just mindless boringness, but it takes a long time to do. All right. The final piece of the crypto technology puzzle is why would anyone waste time participating

in this scheme of I'm going to sit here trying to solve these puzzles and helping to try to make proposals to extend the ledger. Well, that's where crypto currencies come in. So on most of these distributed ledger technologies, if you succeed, you're the one who solves the puzzle and get an entry added to the ledger, the rule of the system is you get a little bit of that system's currency. So the original Bitcoin blockchain,

the way new bitcoins were generated was by, people successfully expanding the ledger. So the ledger could be used for whatever you want. These entries have stuff that have nothing to do with cryptocurrency, but the miners, as they're called, who are doing the work to solve the puzzles to try to grow this in a consistent fashion, in a fashion that everyone can see solving puzzles, which spreads it out, spreads out the proposals,

and keeps us all on the same page. They get paid. And they get paid because you just say, okay, this is the miner who solved this puzzle. He gets this mini Bitcoin. She gets this mini Bitcoin. And then you just look on the ledger and you now have that much Bitcoin. So that's why everyone is working to extend the ledger

because they want the currency rewards. So the currency, the currency incentivizes random people out there to actually work on keeping the ledger going. But the ledger itself is being used for all sorts of different uses. I mean, this is a key distinction that I think people with just a casual interaction with crypto don't quite understand. The currencies are what motivates the distributed work on the ledgers. The ledgers have a lot more usefulness beyond just being able to support generating currency

and passing it back and forth to each other. So that's the basics of what's going on with crypto. So I heard an interesting interview. Dan Olson went on Ezra Klein show early in April to talk about crypto. And he had an interesting interview. and he was giving an overview of the technology sector itself. And his argument was in the early days of crypto, a lot of the focus was on the currency itself.

So again, currency is generated by expanding this ledger. The ledger can be used for all sorts of things, but you can then use the ledger itself to actually keep track of who has what money. You get a financial system there. And the original, according to Dan Olson, the original push in crypto was the currencies will be a big deal because it's an unregulated currency that can't be controlled by any particular government. We're going to have a new financial system that's not cited in any particular country.

It would be this financial system of the internet. Now, according to Olson, a lot of those promises didn't come true. It didn't happen. Venezuela did not adopt Bitcoin. It did not destabilize world economies. People actually like fiat currencies that are controlled by governments with bankers who think about these things. So then the focus shifted. And now it shifted more towards, okay, forget the currencies are useful for incentivizing people to help work on the ledgers, but it's all the other stuff you can do.

And now you hear about NFTs and digital ownership and it's going to unlock this new web economy. You hear a lot about Web 3, which is basically like the web. But we're now you can keep track of who owns what by putting entries into a distributed crypto distributed ledger. So now the emphasis has changed towards other things. you might use these distributed ledgers for. According to Olson, a big push right now from the crypto boosters is a distributed social media service where you can post things onto the chain. Everyone can see it. Everyone knows who post it. No particular company needs to exist to control the data or mine the data in some sort of secret way. So that's where the energy has shifted. All right,

here comes my inconvenient, potentially very naive question. Why do we need this puzzle, proof of work, puzzle solving, distributed nature for this ledger? Once people discover, it is really useful to have a public ledger that everyone can inspect and everyone can see the same thing and it's not forgeable and it doesn't change. Once we understand that's really useful for lots of applications, Once we enter this world that Dan Olson's talked about now where it's less about the currency, but more about you can have a social media service on the ledger that no one owns. You can have contracts.

You can have DAOs. You can do public offerings and all this interesting stuff, getting around having to have a lot of having to go through like a lot of overhead. Why are there not going to be just private companies offering useful, very fast ledgers? Here's a scenario. Imagine Google comes along, says here's good news. It's a very simple product for Google to build. We have a ledger, and you can send an entries.

We enter it into the ledger. Everyone can inspect the ledger. It's signed by Google, so it's not going to be forged. It's publicly accessible. Every entry has a hash of the ledger up to that point. So you can verify that this entry, follows all of the entries to come up to this point. It would be very fast, obviously.

It's a very simple technology to build. You could have all sorts of useful features that are hard to implement in a truly distributed ledger, such as different priorities or larger amounts of data. I mean, look, it would work really well. This is, I do distributed systems. It would be a simple system to build. So if we think publicly inspectable ledgers are useful, why are we not going to just eventually have private companies?

So here you go. Here's one to use. It's very fast. No currency even needs to be involved. You could pay a little bit of money to put entries in there. I think companies would gladly do that. Or you pay a little bit of money if you want, I don't know, express access. Now there's two arguments against this that I can imagine, but none of them are like super compelling to me.

So the first argument is the the crypto libertarian argument that no, that the thing, you that's required for all crypto-based technologies, the thing that's important is that it's not owned by one company. It's not owned by one country. Because if it was, what if they're going to trick us? You know, we don't know what's happening. What if they, we can't trust that they're running it right? We want to be completely transparent. It's just the citizens of the world working together to implement this thing. There's a, there's a nice philosophical ring to that, that it truly is distributed, that it is kind of no one, no one company that controls it. But again, I think when we get away from that central core of sort of hardcore cyber libertarian

cryptotypes, I mean, do we really think Google is going to trick us and doctor the logbook somehow? I mean, for one thing, why we trust these companies for any number of other things. But for another thing, public ledgers are very easily verifiable, right? So if Google is like, I'm going to fork this ledger, I'm going to tell this person, this is entry 7, I can tell this person, this other thing is entry 7 because I am Google and I can do this because this is not implemented in distributed fashion. What would happen? Those two people could simply just display to the world their conflicting information from the ledger service signed by Google so Google

can't say, I didn't do that. And then the whole world would know, oh, they lied. And that would be the of the service. I mean, so it's not like there is even a lot of subterfuge that Google could do here in this scenario. So then the other argument, which I think people give to this answer, is, well, we want to be free from government regulation. So if it's being run by a company that is in the United States, then, like, in theory, United States could pressure them for something or have some impact on something. And again, I would say for 98% of the uses of these ledgers, if and when they become just a popular backbone on which to run various types of applications that people might think are useful, no one would care about that. I mean, I think if Google is literally saying,

this is a ledger that we're running, we don't keep track. of what's in it, much in the same way that you can buy database space from a cloud database or you can buy computational cycles from a cloud computational center. We're just offering this to you. The idea that that's going to be heavily controlled, it wouldn't be. And for most of the people to say, I don't care. I want to jump on the ledger for my app that I'm writing that makes it easy to barter or to sell stuff to each other and whatever. I just need a ledger that we can all inspect and trust. I'll use the Google one.

It costs me, you know, $100 a month. So we have unlimited access for our app to put stuff up there. However, it works out, right? Again, beyond the core, the inner circle, I don't think most people are worried. Like, it's very, very important to me that technically no one company owns the ledger. Because technically speaking, I guess it makes it less regulatable. again, that might be true, but for 98% of the purposes, I don't think it matters.

So this is my question. Why can't we get most of the benefit of what crypto gives the broader internet world without having to do this whole distributed mining, solving puzzles, the piece of it that uses all the energy, the piece of it that slows down the whole chain, the piece of it that basically puts most of the control of these things into like a small number of countries where most of that mining is happening anyways. Why not just have a few competing chains privately run, easily verifiable, simple bare metal tech. So it's not doing anything complicated.

Shanigans would quickly be detected. Yes, it's a company that's in a country, but with 98% of the uses of crypto matter. So anyways, this is my question because my prediction is, if the crypto boosters are successful in getting app developers used to using these distributed ledgers, these publicly expected gold distributed ledgers, I think that's going to actually spell their own downfall because if people say this is great, but this is weird having to wait for these people to solve these hash puzzles. We're just going to use Google's private ledger because it's good enough. It's faster and they're not going to trick us and I don't care because this is honestly,

an app that we're implementing with kittens and I'm not really worried about weird government regulation stuff. So that's my question and I think I'll get some answers and crypto people will be upset. I'll tell you what Dan Olson's interpretation of all this was. His interpretation is just there's a small number of venture capital firms that are despairing that after the Web 2.0 revolution,

they don't have a place to invest their money where they could get a Facebook type return. where are the super unicorns and give them 500x on their original investment? And so they're trying to create a new space, especially AZ16. They're trying to create a new space according to Dan Olson where they can put a lot of money early and have it blow up. And that's why they're really boosting it. I don't know if that's true. That's what Dan Olson thinks.

But this is my bigger point. Now I've been thinking about this for a while. Either distributed ledgers aren't that useful. And this is just a hype thing that comes and goes. Or they are really useful, in which case, I'm not going to wait for a mining pool in Scandinavia to solve a hash puzzle. I'd rather just use a very simple, publicly accessible, incredibly high-speed and responsive Google or Apple or Amazon-powered ledger.

Why not? Again, they're not going to trick us. It'd be easy to see if they were. 98% of the uses of this, people aren't worried that there'll be some sort of weird governmental pressure that's going to come in and do God knows what. All right, so that's my inconvenient question about crypto. in the end, does it just lead to a much simpler technology? We already know how to do.

We shall see. All right. Well, as mentioned, we have a bunch of questions to get through. Let me briefly mention a sponsor that allows us to do this show. And that is Headspace. Headspace is an app that you can download that makes it easy to make mindfulness a part of your daily life and improve your mental health for the better by listening to its guided meditations. We can't change what happens in the world, but with Headspace, we can learn to take control

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questions coming up. I drink a little coffee to get ready for this. All right, we're good. Eight questions. All right, let's rock and roll. Number one, Tom asks, why should I optimize my productivity if my company rewards overtime? I work at a marketing consultancy where my company sells consultants on an hourly rate to our customers. How should I apply your productivity advice when my company inherently rewards working more. I can't just work less than eight hours because then we could not bill those eight hours to our customer. All right, good question, Tom. What does productivity mean if you're not trying to reduce the number of hours that you work? You have a fixed number of hours that you need to work. This comes up,

I'll tell you where it comes up a lot is actually lawyers. Lawyers get a lot of email. A lot of lawyers get a lot of email. And I've talked to some lawyers about this and they say there's not a lot of pressure to get more efficient about email because it slows things down. Yes, because the context shifting and you're jumping back and forth, but you can bill that time. Slowing down is not necessarily the worst thing in a billable hour scenario. So what should you do with my type of productivity in that type of setting. Well, Tom, I'm still going to argue that even with a fixed number of hours that you have to track and work, you want to make those hours as good as possible. Good, not just for your client, but good for you. And that probably means, again,

minimizing context shifts and getting a good deep to shallow work ratio. But even though you know you're going to bill eight hours. I'm still going to work, first of all, on reducing unnecessary context shift, working on one thing at a time till done, as opposed to tracking multiple things at the same time. To do so, I'm still going to deploy processes and systems to try to tame collaboration and interaction. So it's not just ad hoc on demand. That's going to be a source of stress. That's going to lower your cognitive capacity. It's going to make work harder. I still want my work to be nice and well aligned with the human brain one thing at a time, not constant, unscheduled back and forth. I'm still going to try to maximize the depth of my deep work when I'm doing something

creative or difficult for a client to use a ritual to get into a good mode, to work on that intensely until I'm done. Two things are going to happen. So if you apply my productivity advice without being able to change the total amount of work you do, your work is going to become better. So in addition to it being less training, it's going to be more. become better. You're going to produce better results for your client. You're going to get results faster. So you're going to be able to get through more clients. You know, I finish this project and we bring

on another project. All of that will give you options. And I can't tell you exactly what those options are going to be, but I can tell you that if you start becoming better and better at what you do, your clients are going to like it, your company is going to like it, you're going to be able to charge more, you're going to be more likely to be able to go out on your own. It's career capital that you are going to be able to trade in or invest for cool things down the line. I can't tell you what those things are going to be, but they will be there. What you do not want to do is say, it doesn't really matter. So why don't I just be inefficient? When I just be back and forth on email and slack and fall behind on things and have to scramble at the last minute because this client needs

something and there's always hair on fire emergencies because why not I can bill for all this. And the reason why not is because it's a miserable way to work and you distract it and run down and you're not producing at your best. So put my advice in the play, Tom, to organize yourself, to reduce context shifting, to increase depth. Someone wrote a book once that said, being so good they can't ignore you is something that leads to good things. All right, we got a question here from Marika. It's about ADHD. Marika says, my friend got diagnosed with ADHD.

For her, it was, for her, she decided that deep work and ADHD were not compatible. and she was sad to realize that she had to drop it completely. I don't think this is right. I feel that it just has some extra specifics. So what is your stance on that? Maybe some reader's experience that you might share and help people like us navigate the issue. All right.

So Marika elaborated, she also has ADHD and she thinks that her friend's experience with it her conclusion about it was wrong. So Marika thinks it shouldn't be incompatible with Deep work. Her friend thinks that it is. Well, Marika, I agree with you. I hear from a fair number of listeners and readers who have ADHD

and they work with the ideas of deep work and context shifting. And I think you are completely right. ADHD can be very compatible with a strong, deep to shallow work ratio can be very compatible with careful attention management. It can be very compatible with building career capital through working deeper than your peers. It requires more care.

It requires more care. And I think that is absolutely right. For a lot of people with ADHD, the issue is that the context shifting distractions have a pretty strong pull. And then once engaged in, it can be very hard to get back. So they can't, you can't just casually say,

okay, I'm going to put aside my email now and try to work deeply. to succeed with these ideas with ADHD, you have to be more strict with things like time blocking. This is what I'm doing now, this is what I'm doing next. So having this idea that there's a plan you're executing,

that you're not just in a mode of what do I want to work on next. That is a very difficult mode for ADHD. Full capture is critical. The more you trust things are off your mind, the more your mind can let those things go. A David Allen-Stol, open loop. Oh yeah, I have to get back to this thing. This is kind of important. And I'm keeping

track of it just in my mind. That is a dangerous cognitive status if you have ADHD because your mind will say, we got to get to this thing. We got to get to this thing. So it makes it much difficult to focus. So full capture is really important. So written down, it goes into the systems. I check this system at the beginning and end of every day. You really got to treat your mind to trust. If it's in my system, I don't have to think about it. And then Richie, and scheduling philosophy becomes really important as well. So when do I do deep work? How do I schedule it? It can't be casual. It can't just be, oh, I'm into mood for it.

And having ritual around the work is critical if you have ADHD in particular. I go to this different room. I go to the shed I have for concentrating out in the backyard. I go up to the attic where I set up a desk. I clear everything off my desk. I switch to another old computer to do this work that has none of my passwords logged in. All I can do on there is right. I go for a walk.

I start to session outside without my phone. ritual is really important to get your mind into the deep work mode. Now, if you do all those things, not only is deep work compatible with ADHD, you can actually excel at it because if you do these things correctly, you can actually harness the ability of hyperfocus. Terminology, a lot of people with ADHD apply to their ability to when they lock in to have incredibly intense focus. The time blocking, full capture, ritual, and scheduling philosophy

can actually help actually corral and aim hyperfinding. or focus, and you can often get even more intense work done than someone that is deploying some of these ideas more casually. So Rika, I think for many people, including many with ADHD, focusing on deep work, being careful about shallow work, obsessing about context shifting. This can be something that you can do. You just have to be more careful about it than someone else. Right. I like it. Rapid fire. Rapid fire, maybe without the distraction of Jesse. I'm rolling here.

All right, let's keep going. Giovanni comes to us with question three. Giovanni asks, how do I find depth and quiet downtime when living with housemates? I recently decided to move into a shared house with seven other very smart people to get some social life back. I love my housemates who are all very smart and intriguing persons. However, sometimes this affects my.

attempts to lower exposure for entertainment. For instance, if I'm having a meal and would rather read than watch a TV show while eating, sometimes someone comes to the living room and just turns on the TV. I won't force anyone to turn it off just because I want to read. So I end up just streaming something since reading is not possible anyway. Well, Giovanni, first of all, I recommend that you with great authority and disdain yell out the word deep, deep, deep. Anytime any of your housemates does anything that is the slightest bit distracting,

they will respect you for this and they will enjoy it. If you really need to make the message clear, I would say have a good supply of my book, deep work on hand and chuck it at people. So if someone's trying to turn on the TV while you're trying to read and they ignore your continuous yelling of deep, deep, deep, chuck that book, hit him in the head with it. And they'll say, you know what, Giovanni?

I respect you. I respect your deep work. This book seems interesting. I'm going to buy a copy. That's my advice. Assuming that doesn't work, assuming that doesn't work, I guess I have a few other things to mention.

Here's my main actual advice, Giovanni. I think you need a little bit more structure around your high-quality leisure in terms of where you do it and when you do it. And more of this should perhaps be outside of your house. You have a crowded house. A lot of people have a crowded house. You have a lot of roommates. I have a lot of kids.

Same idea. So you have to put a little bit more thought into when I'm doing my leisure where I don't want to be distracted, when and where do I do it? So maybe reading a book in your living room that you share with seven people during a meal time is not a really optimized plan for where you're going to get that reading done. So maybe you have a part of your shared house like out back on the back patio that you go out there and you read out there. You have like an evening read, maybe bring like a drink with you or some tea if it's in the morning and you sit out there and you read and you know hear the sounds of nature. and like that's outside of the distraction of the house. You've set that up. And maybe in the winter, you make a little fire in the fire pit.

So maybe there's something like that at the house. Also, though, lean into, if you live with lots of people, you might want to lean into other locations for leisure. And then you can say, look, I work. There's other places I go for leisure. When I'm home in the house, I socialize. That's why you moved in this house was for socialization. So you might want to just be in a default.

Like, let's just chill. When I see people, I talk to them and we just have impromptu conversations, and it's nice and that's what I wanted. And when I want to read, or think or listen to Deep Questions Podcasts, I have other places I go. There's the library. I don't know. I go to the library.

There's a public gardens I go to. If you're in Washington, D.C., you go to like the free museums like I used to do. And they're fined on various floors where they have seats you could sit in and sit there and work and look over the mall. Pubs. This is a very British thing. Americans don't do this as much, but British people are more used to this idea because of bringing a book to a pub. you know, it's winter, like a fire going. You have your like semi-pretentious hardcover book.

You know, you get a weak pint and you read the book there. You get used to that. It's like a very British thing, but I think it's kind of nice. Right. But you see what I'm getting at here. Don't just casually, wherever I happen to be in this crowded house, I kind of want to do leisure, like read a book or think or work on something. People are kind of around and I give up and what can I do?

you can do a lot of things. This is where I do this type of leisure. This is when I do it. Here's the ritual surrounding it. And when you're not in one of those set locations or doing one of those set rituals, then you can kind of just chill and watch the thing that your friend puts on. All right. Thank you, Giovanni.

Moving on, we have Jim. Jim says, I'm an assistant professor at an R1 university. The problem is I have to track publications of the slightly broader field. There are a ton of papers being published and it's not an easy job to track all of the tables of contents and actually read them. Nowadays, I'm only following about 15 journal table of contents, but I always miss something outside of these journals. Is there any tips on that? And Jim, you're trying to track way too many journals. the idea that you're going to keep track of everything published and even a small field is impossible and quixotic.

And so I can save you a lot of grief now by saying you probably need to read less academic literature. Now my advice for academics is always to have more specific sources of academic reading. something more specific than just I'm trying to read everything. And so there's three things that I think can do this. One, reading groups. So when there is a topic that is emerging that you think is important, and we should know about this topic, you should have a reading group of other professors and grad students

where people present papers each week, and now you have a forcing function. But that's focusing on one particular topic, and you're sharing the load among multiple people. So reading groups are excellent. When an assistant professor, you should be in at least one that is important. to let your specific projects pull you into certain literatures. It's a much more targeted and effective way to keep up with the literature.

I'm publishing a paper now. To publish this paper, I need to understand all the work on X, Y, and Z so I can cite it properly. That then pushes you to read the papers on X, Y, and Z. This is a much more motivating approach to this work because you know you have to read it to finish a paper you need to submit. Now you have motivation. Now you can get through those papers. So it's a much more directed pursuit. As opposed to, I just happen to already read about X, Y, and Z because I'm keeping up with 15 journals, which again, Jim is crazy. And I already know it. That's not going to happen. So let particular papers demand that you read particular cited related works. You can cite it properly. That's much more focus.

And then course prep. So especially if you're teaching graduate courses, you know, find a topic that you know something about, would like to know the literature better, the course will then force you to read that literature because you have to teach. You need to know what you're talking about. So courses are a fantastic way to get up the speed on literatures. What all of these have in common is you have other things that you are committed to and that are important that then demand of you that you read specific types of papers. So it is pulling the literature into your life to help solve particular problems. That is the much more, I think, long-term sustainable way to keep up with the literature, as opposed to trying to just push this stuff into your life.

Let me just read all the journals. Let me just keep up with everything that's going on. That being said, I think it's fine to get the email alerts from a few journals that are really close to you, the TOC alerts to see, is there something a paper that looks really relevant? And so you can occasionally just come across a paper that's really relevant. but I just don't think trying to keep up with everything is the way to go. Now, two other things I'll mention. This might be a little bit computer science specific.

But for us in computer science, most of our competitive peer-reviewed publications happen in conferences, peer-reviewed proceedings, not in journals, because it's the fast-moving cycle. We basically treat conference proceedings like journals, like journals with time limits on the reviews. Going to conferences is a great way to find papers that you think you need to read.

So you go to a conference, you hear the people giving talks about their papers. You could then talk to the author themselves about their papers. You might come away from a conference having read three or four interesting works. So it's kind of like an in-person real-time exposure

to interesting articles. The other thing that works pretty well, at least in computer science, is Google Scholar. Google Scholar, you know, you set up a profile that know who you are, so it tracks all the papers you publish in the citations. It then uses Google Magic to say,

here's recent papers you use. should probably know about. That actually works pretty well. At least for me, I found that works pretty well. It's pretty good at finding recent papers that are related to stuff I do. And so I will glance at that every once in a while and that will generate a few papers. So like what I'm trying to say here with these last two points is, yes, there are ways to serendipitously come across papers that you don't need for a particular purpose, but you read because they're useful. But the right ways to do that is usually not I read 15 journals every month. It's things like I go to a conference and hear a talk I like, and now I know about that paper.

Or I look at the Google Scholar recommendations, and I say, oh, look at this. Someone just followed up on one of my papers. I should probably know about that. But for the most part, have much more specific reasons for reading a paper. And reading groups, related work for publication,

and courses are going to be your number one source of journal articles that you encounter. All right, let's move on, move on now. There's baseball terminology. Let's keep the line moving with a question from Conrad. So we're getting, this is habit tune up, guys. Like we're in it. Productivity questions, five minutes at a time.

I like it. Getting the cobwebs dusted off here. All right, Conrad, what do you have for us? Conrad says, I have tried time block planning, but it doesn't work for me. A combination of my job and my type B personality means I need to organically discover the most important task to focus on in the day, during the day. Once I assess all the variables in the morning, I will feel a natural pull towards a particular endeavor. And that's how I enter the flow state. If I try to plan this in advance, it just doesn't happen. I will end up doing something

different to what I have written down. Well, Conrad, to each their own. But what you are doing is just a less effective way of working. And I don't buy, I have no choice. My personality demands it of me. I'm just going to wander into something else if I try to plan it. That's all nonsense. Yeah. Time blocking is hard because you have to figure out of schedule and you have to stick to it and that requires some discipline, but work is hard.

That's just the reality. You have to wrangle your energy and try to direct it actively towards useful behavior. So if what you're doing works for you, that's fine. I'm just saying you're not going to be nearly as effective. Just wandering through your day, like what do I feel? like doing. Spoiler alert, your brain is not going to pull you consistently towards the best things that you should be doing. Spoiler alert number two, you're also going to get a lot less things done. So you'll fall behind on things. Deadlines will come up. Now again, to each their own,

if that's fine, that's fine. I'm just saying, I'm not going to let you off the hook by saying you have no other choice. To me, it's like an athlete, a professional athlete coming to me and saying, look, man, this whole thing of having workout routines at the gym, all these different reps and sets, and it's also hard and it hurts my muscles, that's just not me. My mind doesn't like that. I usually just like to see what type of activity feels natural. I want to be free. I want to jog and play.

And I just, that's just the type of person I am. And I would say that's fine, but you're also probably going to get cut from the team because the other people on the team are working out hard even though they don't want to and now they're in better shape. and now they can perform better. I think that's the same thing that's going on here. Yeah, time blocking is a pain and it's annoying, but it's better than stumbling through your day. A couple of things that might help you. So let me give you some help to make time blocking less onerous

because I don't want you to give up on it. Less granularity, so don't try to be too fine-tuned, have big, broad blocks. You maybe block out the core things they're going to do and when they're going to happen, but otherwise have very broad admin blocks where you're maybe just pointing out. Here's a few things I want to get,

done. Give yourself buffers and over schedule. I'm going to give myself two hours to kind of end the day. I probably only have like an hour's worth of stuff to clean up, but let me just give myself a lot of breathing room. I think that's useful. Give yourself three days at first if you want to. Like I'll tell you what on Fridays, I'm just going to do the wander through the day thing, but Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, I'm going to time block so you can kind of ease yourself into it. But I'm not going to tell you that you're unable to time block. I'm not going to tell you that a sort of list reactive or most important thing of the day type approach is going to be better. It's a lot of wasted energy.

It's a lot of misguided priorities. You do something that's really not that important. The thing that needs to get done doesn't get done. A lot of things come out of just wandering through your day that aren't the best. So Conrad, you can time block. I won't be mad if you don't. I'm not going to tell you that you can. All right.

We got a question here from Carolina. Carolina wants to know about Netflix. She says, what is a good way to smartly use streaming platforms such as Netflix? I really enjoy watching movies and series, but I feel that I'm not always in control. I can get trapped in them. And instead of watching just one episode of a series,

I end up watching three or four. What would you suggest is the best way to use these platforms wisely? Keep in mind that this is a pleasurable activity for me. I'm not super worried about it, first of all, Carolina. So if what we're talking about is it's the evening. You've done your work and you time blocked and you had your shutdown and you plan to watch one episode and then do something else and go to bed and you watch three episodes instead. I mean, it's not the worst thing.

All right. So let me just first say that. Now, if you're doing this like in the middle of the day, Oh, I wanted to watch an episode during my 30 minute lunch break and I end up taking two hours off. Okay, that's a problem. Solution is simple. Don't touch stream platforms during the workday. But if we're talking about in the evening, you know, you're watching some interesting show on Netflix and you watch for an hour instead of 20 minutes.

I mean, I'm not super worried about that. I'm not super worried about that. A few things I can suggest. One is multiple people told me during the research for my book, Digital Minimalism. Multiple people told me that they had success with a don't watch Netflix alone rule. These are younger people, typically people who had roommates, etc. And they didn't want to get lost, like spend all of their free time on streaming platforms. They had a rule that says you can watch it as long as someone else is there.

So you can still get the social benefit out of the platform. I want to sit and watch a series with my friends and it's social and that's fun, but get rid of the like mindless distraction potential. of the platform where you just sort of watch it on your own for a long amount of time. So that might help. Two, I think you should just structure better your other high quality leisure activities. So if you have more structure and clarity around the other stuff you want to do with your free time, you know, I'm trying to do like Cal's five books a month challenge, getting into making

and I've joined an online community where I'm trying to build something and I meet once a week with people or I'm into fitness and now I have a trail running group that we meet once a week and I need the train for it. If you have like structured focused engaging, hopefully somewhat social high quality leisure, then that will just take up good time and it will take that time away from just getting lost on Netflix. You know, I mean, this is the other issue. When some people complain, they spend too much time staring at these streaming services is because they're filling a void. They don't know what to do. Work is over. It's not time to go to bed. I'm a little anxious. I'm a little sad. I don't know

what to do. Let me just get lost in this. And the right answer, if you're in that situation, is not just white-knuckle it and stare at the wall. It's find something even better than Netflix to do. So when it comes time to watch Netflix, you're like, oh, look, I was just out on the trail all day. I just finished building this thing. I just finished my fourth book. Now I'm going to watch some Netflix and, okay, maybe I watch two instead of one or three instead of two. It doesn't really matter. So you can make your leisure clear and more structured and higher quality. Then you leave less oxygen in the room for the streaming services. So I will give you all that. advice. But again, my foundation here is I'm not, I'm not super worried about you watching it a little

bit more than you want. I'm worried if it's what you're spending all your time doing. I'm worried if it's getting the way of work. And so that other, those other pieces of advice should help in that situation. Another thing that could help all of us is Athletic Greens. Another one of this show's sponsor, Athletic Greens is something that I actually use. I took my athletic greens this morning. You've heard me talk about it before. It is a powder that has in it over 75 high-quality vitamins, minerals, whole food, source, superfoods, probiotics, and adaptogen. So all the different stuff that you need, you just take one scoop of that powder and the 12 ounces of water each morning.

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And so my tip is I put in the water so I can see it's the right 12 ounces. Then I add the ice because now I don't have to worry. I say I have the right amount and then I add the powder, then I shake it. So you're welcome for that pro-health tip. So right now it's time to reclaim your health and arm your immune system with convenient daily nutrition, especially as we continue to be in cold season. I can tell you from experience, we are definitely still in cold season. Whole family has been affected recently.

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Let me tell you what you need for your mind are good friends at Blinkist. The Blinkist app gives you access to short 15-minute summaries of thousands of bestselling and important non-fiction books. these short summaries which are called Blinks can be read or you can listen to them while you are on the go as I like to say and I've been saying for two years now almost on the show I like to use Blinkist to help figure out

what I need to read and what I don't need to read if there is a book that is getting a lot of press I will go to the Blink first get the main ideas half the time I'll say that's all I need to know. Half the time I'll say, ooh, this is one I need to buy and I can purchase it with confidence. It's also a great way to learn a new field. Listen to five blinks of related books.

Now you know the terminology. Now you know the major ideas. Now you know of the various books that are popular. What's the one that you should buy? So if you are a reader and a lot of my listeners are, Blinkus is a great tool to add to your reader's toolkit. Right now, Blinkis has a special offer just for our audience. go to blinkus.com slash deep to start your free seven-day trial and get 25% off a Blinkist premium

membership. That's Blinkis, spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-S-T, Blinkist.com slash deep to get 25% off and a seven-day free trial, Blinkis.com slash deep. All right. Looking at my time here. Let's do two more questions. Rapid fire. I'm going to be quick here. I have two more I want to do. All right. Moses asks, do you have have a structured approach through which you conduct analysis, especially a complex subjects that have so much depth. I collect a lot of data, but once it comes to a point of reconciling them, it becomes quite some work. How do you prefer to collect data than conduct analysis later, analyze on the go? So Moses, I don't have a complicated system for doing this when it comes to

the topics I write about. And I'm going to separate that from the topics I do academic mathematical called research on. Put that aside. For now, let's talk about the types of things I write about tech and culture and productivity and meaning. I don't have a really complicated process. I immerse myself in what I want to write about. I read a lot about it. I talk to a lot of people about it. If it's something I really want to know well, you look for what writers call sometimes circularity. So you're following references, this person quotes this person, that person quotes this person, and these references eventually lead you back to things you've already read before. And you feel like you've closed the loop of here's the main things everyone's written and

everything's referring to each other. And then I often just let that simmer. So you have all these pieces and bits and bits and pieces floating around in your head. You let that simmer. And then at some point you try to pull the pieces together to make an argument or to make a really good summary. And you might run it by someone. I'll do this a lot with writing. Like a I call it like an off-the-record sanity check. I'll talk to someone who really knows about something. I say, look, I'm not going to quote anything you say. This is not to talk about you into peace.

Let me just pitch you my understanding of this. Let me pitch you my idea and you tell me where I'm wrong. So like at the beginning of this episode, I asked this question about crypto. That's kind of like an off-the-record Sandy check. I will get back a lot of information from that that will help me refine my understanding of crypto going forward. You pull together a bunch of pieces. You try to pull together.

You get some feedback on it. That's basically the system. I don't have a complex structured note-taking system. There is not some sort of Zetelcast and magic where if I just connect these pieces properly and then look at the connection graph that new insights will emerge. The human brain is good at this stuff. Give it fuel. Give it a lot of fuel.

Actually try to pull things out of that. Sandy check the things you pull out. and you will get more and more. Academic research is different. That's much harder because understanding, especially in theoretical computer science, you have to understand complex math in order to extend the complex math.

So there, a big part of the technique is actually trying to recreate from scratch definitions and proof techniques. Like you're writing out proofs, your rewording definitions, your own word. It's like by writing things yourself, trying to do it from scratch, like you're teaching a classroom,

That's how you internalize the mathematical concepts, and then you can make progress trying to improve them. So there's a whole other toolkit for trying to analyze complex projects, ideas in mathematics, but that's probably not as relevant as what I talked about first. So immerse yourself, Sandy, check your understanding, repeat. All right, one last question. Final question comes from Micah.

Micah says, how do you keep your weekly planning session so short? In a recent episode, you mentioned that you take 30 to 60 minutes to plan your week. Is this including your inbox cleanup? My weekly planning takes up to three hours and sometimes feel more like half a day of working the list reactive mode. Well, Micah, most of your time is inbox.

Separate the inbox from how you think about your weekly planning. How long it takes you to clean your inbox just depends on your job. If you live in a work in a hyperactive hive mind type setting, it could take you all day or half a day to just try to catch up with your inbox. And I get that. But don't make that. don't charge that against weekly planning and say, well, I shouldn't weekly plan because it takes four hours to do. Those are two different things. Those are two different things. So yes, if I have a lot of

email, so if I had a week, for example, where I'm really heavily scheduled, I'm going to fall behind on my inboxes. Trying to catch up on the inbox is going to take a long amount of time. But I don't charge that the weekly planning. That's just part of the week's work, catching up with communications or what have you. So I would separate those two things. A couple of things I'd recommend is maybe do that clean out on Friday. I'm going to do this Friday afternoon, like catch up as much as possible my inbox so that I can plan clean on Monday morning and have that really focus on the planning itself and not getting overwhelmed by all of those emails. So when you clean it on Friday, you know, it's generating lots of obligations, which go on your task list, which you'll then

separately see on Monday. So separating can be useful. If your weekly inbox clean is onerous, Finding some separation between that and your weekly planning is going to make your weekly planning itself seamless owners. It's also going to make it a lot more effective because you can really put your energy to figuring out how you want to move the chess pieces for that week and not just being overwhelmed by, you know, message number 300 that you don't know how to quickly answer. The other implicit question here is should you try to catch up on your email at least once a week? So you do your best during the week. You fall behind. I think it's largely a good thing to do. If at some point during the end of the week or the beginning of the next,

you can get everything out of that inbox and either dispatched with or into other types of task systems, etc., I think that's better. I think it's mentally draining to think that there's stuff in there that probably requires your attention but you're ignoring. And then knowing new stuff is piling on it. So starting from a clean slate, you're going to keep up with it longer. I think you're going to get more out of your head. if it's impossible, if it's hours and hours you can't keep up, that's your problem.

Right? So the solution is not, I'll just give up on that. The solution is I need to read Cal's book, A World Without Email. And I need to get more serious about getting more of our coordination out of ad hoc back and forth messaging and into other types of structured systems because this is insane. I can't work if there's piling up missives I can't keep up with. This is crazy. You need to actually solve that problem at the root. But if you can keep that email reasonable, something where you can more or less keep up throughout the week and then with an extra hour or to get it down to empty at the end of each week, then separate that from the planning, treat it as something different.

All right, there we go. That's how we do it. One hour, eight questions. A naive, deep dive that's going to get me yelled at by crypto people. I think we had a successful afternoon. Thank you, everyone who tuned in. I'll be back on Monday with Jesse, God willing, back in the studio for the, you next episode of the Deep Questions podcast. If you like what you heard, you will like what you

see, go to YouTube.com slash Kalunport Media for video of the full episode and select segments. And until then, or we'll be back next week, I should say. And until then, as always, stay deep.